Feminism

They had jobs, but feminists weren't satisfied; every other woman had to get one too. So they opened fire on homemakers with a savagery that still echoes throughout our culture. A housewife is a "parasite," [Betty] Frieden writes; such women are "less than fully human" insofar as they "have never known a commitment to an idea."

Housewives, not men, were the prey in feminism's sights when Kate Millett decreed in 1969 that the family must go. Feminists do not speak for traditional women. Men cannot know this, however, unless we tell them how we feel about them, our children, and our role in the home. Men must understand that our feelings towards them and our children are derided by feminists and have earned us their enmity. Whether or not this understanding garners men's support, traditional women must defend ourselves because the feminist offensive is, most essentially, a breach of solidarity with us, a disavowel of the obligation to honor the Women's Pact [that religious celibates, professional women, and homemakers respect each other] that women in the movement owed to us.

"I am not the sort of woman who goes blonde," writes novelist Jane Smiley, before explaining how she did just that and, in the process, what sort of woman she discovered herself to be. A feminist intellectual and practical Midwesterner, Smiley had always "abjured vanity." She wore glasses and plain white cotton underwear, had a "short, masculine hairdo," and never, ever shaved her legs or underarms. Her looks reflected her convictions. "If I dyed my hair," she thought, "that would lead to makeup, and inevitably, to manicures, facials, panty hose, and the wholesale submission to the patriarchy." But that reasoning itself reflected the stereotypes of an earlier era, the idea that women must choose between intelligence and beauty, mind and body, substance and surface.

In her early forties, Smiley discovered that her studied indifference to her appearance was sending unwanted signals and hiding important aspects of her personality. The man she was interested in didn't see her as a woman. She fretted to her therapist. The therapist sent her to his colorist. Thus began her new life of blonde hair and shaved armpits -- of new pleasures and new meaning. "Sometimes I stand in front of the mirror and simply admire it," she says of her caramel-colored hair. "It is a beautiful, layered, shimmering gold, soft and sparkly, a hair color that has no relation to me and no counterpart in the animal world. I would hate to give it up."

Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style, How the Rise of Aesthetic Value is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness [HarperCollins, 2003, pp.117-118]

According to 2010 BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] data, the following jobs contain 1 percent female workers or less: boilermaking, brickmasonry, stonemasonry, septic tank servicing, sewer pipe cleaning and working with reinforcing iron and rebar. Maybe the reason female workers aren't in these occupations is that too many are in other occupations. Females are 97 percent of preschool and kindergarten teachers, 80 percent of social workers, 82 percent of librarians and 92 percent of dietitians and nutritionists and registered nurses.

Walter E. Williams, "Equality or Inequality," 29 February 2012

More than 90 percent of job-related deaths occur among men...

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, Basic Books, 2011, p.135

A reporter from the Daily Caller then pointed out that the women on Nancy Pelosi's own staff average 27 percent lower incomes than the men on her staff. Does that show that Pelosi herself is guilty of discrimination against women? Or does it show that such simple-minded statistics are grossly misleading?

Thomas Sowell, "The real 'war on women'," 6 June 2012

For years, even decades, "progressive" criticism had characterized industrial labor as dehumanizing -- constituting the use of persons as machines -- and had dismissed white collar managerial, clerical, or sales jobs as shallow careerism or exercises in pointless, empty, venal, and meaningless commercial mummeries (e.g. Arthur Miller's 1949 "Death of a Salesman"). Yet the disappearance of industrial jobs through increasing automation and the use of robots is greeted with horror; and, more significantly, feminism presented to women an ideology that their only true path of fulfillment was to enter the workforce precisely to fill the sort of managerial, clerical, or sales jobs previously disparaged, with "Rosie the Riveter" the icon for female industrial jobs -- while raising children in suburbia was abject, stupifying idiocy and slavery. To be sure, the feminists were probably thinking more of "creative" jobs in art, journalism, academia, politics, etc. as meeting criteria of human fulfillment, i.e. the sorts of jobs feminists probably had themselves. But on the ground, the number of such jobs is very limited; and most women would find themselves on their feet or in a cubicle, doing things both repetitive and boring, eight hours a day, or looking at a computer screen -- probably with something like Gummy Bear sales figures on it. Even F. Carolyn Graglia, cited above, who began a career as a lawyer, soon reflected that drawing up contracts for corporate clients, although pleasingly remunerative, held little attraction, or promise of it, in terms of personal fulfillment.

Enklinobarangus ()

Between men there is by nature merely indifference; but between women there is already by nature hostility. This is due to the fact that with men the odium figulinum [professional jealousy] is limited to their particular guild, whereas with women it embraces the whole sex since they all have only one line of business. Even when they meet in the street, they look at one another like Guelphs and Ghibellines. Moreover on first acquaintance, two women meet each other obviously with more stiffness and dissimulation than do two men in a similar situation.

It's a no-brainer that we should have the right to marry. But I also think, equally, that it's a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist. [applause] So, that causes my brain some trouble and part of why it causes me trouble is because fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we're going to do with marriage when we get there. You know, because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change. And that is a lie. The institution of marriage is going to change and it should change and again, I don't think it should exist.

I had always sensed strongly the furious, vindictive hatred of life implicit in that system of ideas and values; and sensed, too, that in order to be consistent with its premises a system of this sort was forced to abominate art.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music [1872, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, translated by Francis Golffing, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956, p.10]

In a Washington Post column, critic Ann Hornaday accused Hollywood A-listers Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen of inspiring the killing spree carried out by Elliot Rodger in Isla Vista, near the University of California, Santa Barbara, on 23 May 2014. Rodger killed three people by stabbing and three others, including two sorority girls, by gunshot. Others were wounded. He then killed himself. Hornaday said, "How many men, raised on a steady diet of Judd Apatow comedies in which the shlubby arrested adolescent always gets the girl, find that those happy endings constantly elude them and conclude, 'It's not fair?'" Rodger expressed hatred of women for always having refused his overtures, although we later learned that he had had difficulty relating to people his whole life, much to the distress of his parents, who long sought help for him and were in fact on their way to Santa Barbara out of alarm at what he had been saying -- his mother even notified the police, who interviewed Rodger but took no action.

But we should consider what Hornaday is saying. Does she mean that nerdy virgins should take no comfort from boy-meets-girl stories and just accept that they are emasculated losers who will never find love? Does Hornaday have similar objections to, say, Bridget Jones's Diary [book 1996, film 2001], or the vast romance literature, that tells similar stories about women? Or is it just young men that she doesn't care about; for that is what this amounts to. There seems to be real hostility here for shy, lonely, awkward males. They are better not presented with stories of "college life that should be full of 'sex and fun and pleasure'." They might get the wrong idea, like that they could be part of an active social life. Instead, Hornaday comes across like the woman on the dance floor in Play It Again Sam [1972], who says to Woody Allen, "Shove off, creep." Apatow and Rogen might well say to Hornaday, "Perhaps the callousness of someone like you is what pushed Elliot Rodger into a psychotic break." Of course, as in several recent mass shootings, the real problem here was mental illness, in this case in toxic combination with adolescent despair, not misogyny or (as Gloria Allred said) "male chauvinism." But it is always edifying to see unthinking people grinding their ideological axes on other people's suffering.

Enklinobarangus ()

At Brandeis University, we are learning the hierarchy of the new multiculti caste system. In theory, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is everything the identity-group fetishists dig: female, atheist, black, immigrant. If conservative white males were to silence a secular women's rights campaigner from Somalia, it would be proof of the Republican Party's "war on women," or the encroaching Christian fundamentalist theocracy, or just plain old... racism... But when the sniveling white male who purports to be the President of Brandeis (one Frederick Lawrence) does it out of deference to Islam, Miss Hirsi Ali's blackness washes off her like a bad dye job on a telly news anchor. White feminist Germaine Greer [The Female Eunuch, 1970] can speak at Brandeis because, in one of the more whimsical ideological evolutions even by dear old Germaine's standards, Ms. Greer feels that clitoridectomies add to the rich tapestry of "cultural identity": "One man's beautification is another man's mutilation," as she puts it. But black feminist Hirsi Ali, who was on the receiving end of "one's man's mutilation" and lives under death threats because she was boorish enough to complain about it, is too "hateful" to be permitted to speak. In the internal contradictions of multiculturalism, Islam trumps all: race, gender, secularism, everything. So, in the interests of multiculti sensitivity, pampered upper-middle-class trusty-fundy children of entitlement are pronouncing a Somali refugee beyond the pale and signing up to Islamic strictures on the role of women.

Lady, since I am going now beneath the earth, as my last entreaty I ask you to care for my orphaned children: marry my son to a loving [] wife an give my daughter a noble [] husband. And may they not, like their mother, perish untimely but live out their lives in happiness in their ancestral land.

"Sexism" is the term that was coined by feminists for wrongs of belief or action with respect to women that seemed to them comparable to the wrongs of belief and action signified by racism. However, where racists may be reasonably said to have erred in seeing significant genetic differences between human races, there are real continuing questions, and steadily mounting evidence, about whether human sexual differences of behavior and psychology have a genetic basis.

My jumping off point here comes with four recent books. The first three are Christina Hoff Sommers'Who Stole Feminism? [Simon & Schuster, 1994], Camille Paglia'sSexual Personae [Vintage Books, 1991], and Warren Farrel'sThe Myth of Male Power [Simon & Schuster, 1993]. All three of these people themselves believe in a certain form of feminism, what Sommers has dubbed "equity feminism," which is just the principle that there must be legal and political equality for women. Warren Farrel was actually on the national governing board of the National Organization for Women until he became disillusioned and decided that NOW was not fighting for the proper goals. The fourth book is the powerful recent Domestic Tranquility, A Brief Against Feminism by F. Carolyn Graglia [Spence Publishing, Dallas, 1998]. Graglia explicitly opposes feminism as such, except perhaps the "social feminism" of the 19th century, on the principle that identical laws for men and women, which were opposed by the "social feminism," are harmful to women who chose a traditional domestic occupation. Graglia's argument is especially noteworthy in that it is not from a fundamentalist religious point of view, which is where defenses of the traditional domestic life of women usually, or are expected to usually, come from ("bible-thumping retards"), but the essentially secular and rational claims of someone, not unfamiliar with professional life (Columbia Law School, Wall Street law firm), who does not appreciate a legal regime that has become hostile to her and her family.

To gender feminism, Sommers, Paglia, and Farrel are no less "enemies of feminism" (and, for that matter, "enemies of women") than Graglia. The three of them, however, have, to Graglia, bought into the essential feminist revolution, which was that laws cannot be different for the sexes. Since gender feminism is really a totalitarian project, it would be nice if there was a basis of reconciliation between the genuine liberalism of Sommers et. al. and Graglia's Burkean conservativism -- as in fact there is.

This essay will not deal with specific anti-capitalist arguments in feminism, since capitalism as such is defended elsewhere. Questions about economic "power," markets, free exchange, and private property will thus not be dealt with here. A good start is with the essay on Say's Law.

Until the controversy over Anita Hill's charges of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas politically revitalized feminism, many wondered why feminism seemed to have been such a vibrant political movement back in the 70's but since then had retreated into Women's Studies Departments at colleges and universities, where no one paid much attention to it except other academic feminists and college administrators. The answer was really simple enough: in the 70's feminism came to be perceived as simply anti-family, anti-marriage, anti-children, and perhaps even anti-religion, not to mention anti-men. Most early feminists, as especially detailed by Graglia, certainly regarded marriage and family as so burdensome as to approach slavery. Feminism presented the family as a kind of prison, with a working career on the outside as a kind of liberation. This did not take into account that for most people a family has always been the meaning of their life, the finding and creation of the closest relatives that a human being can have. Men did not go to work to enjoy the self-fulfillment of work. They went to work to support their families, often at jobs that they positively hated, or at least just tolerated for the sake of the income. Few men were so fortunate as to be doing something fulfilling or interesting that paid the bills at the same time. While feminists lamented that women often give up years, or all, of their careers in order to have children, even men with hopes of a fulfilling career traditionally have often had to give up those hopes if they suddenly were responsible for a family [note].

But for most people, who never get anywhere near a professional degree in anything, the whole idea of a "fulfilling career" was a little ridiculous. A job was to make a living, and the worth of living was to have that home and spouse and children and some leisure to enjoy them, working at personal projects or hobbies and watching the kids grow up. Because of that, most men were simply bewildered and astonished by feminism back in the 70's; it seemed to come from some sort of comically different reality. At the same time, any women who knew what the working world was like (like Graglia), and who felt that their primary concern, whether they worked outside or not, was their family and children, not only felt bewildered but insulted: feminism tended to portray home life as some sort of idiocy that no enlightened woman would be interested in. That is why the women's vote has rarely gone for out and out feminists (until, perhaps, in some 1992 races -- although there was still no "gender gap" in the votes cast for George Bush), even while working women did want equal pay for equal work, etc. On the CBS television magazine Sixty Minutes, in January 1992, Gloria Steinem said that only the "enemies of feminism" ever said that women could "have it all" -- both career and family. That is an astonishing thing for her to have said. If feminists had ever frankly admitted that family would be impossible for a real career woman (as it was for Steinem), then not only would feminism have failed at its own goals but it would simply have been Dead On Arrival for all but the smallest minority of woman; and it is inconceivable who these "enemies of feminism" would have been who could have perpetrated the hoax that women could have had both career and family.

But more important than any misestimation or misunderstanding about what people valued, feminism was perceived as having positive reasons to hate the family: not only ignoring but militantly rejecting the focus of meaning in people's lives. The hostility to the family came from ideological & political reasons: any old social function that the family may have fulfilled was to be fulfilled by the state instead, much more safely and effectively. Safely because children would be outside the influence of reactionary parents, especially patriarchal men. Effectively because they would be in the hands of politically sound professional "care givers." The literature was full of how wonderfully this had been working in the Soviet Union, Israel, etc. What the professionals could accomplish best, of course, was to erase the old sexist gender differences by socializing the children differently. This view rested, then, on the theory that gender differences are the result only of arbitrary social convention.

The problem with the examples cited so warmly, however, was that they were often monstrous acts of totalitarianism, and that they failed. The problem with the theory that personality and gender differences are entirely the result of environment, not heredity, is that it is indeed a prescription for just the kind of coercion and tyranny that most conspicuously tried to exploit its possibilities: if everything that we are is just socialization, then the reasonable thing is to socialize us in the best way possible, and that would be through the agency of those who know best. Those who know best, in turn, would be those politically favored, or at least self-appointed with enough fanfare. The socialization, in turn, would be a thorough indoctrination which, if done to adults, would have been called brain washing -- but then the brain was supposed to have been blank in the first place. Cambodia took this to the logical extreme: if you simply kill the parents, then that leaves the children in the hands of the state by default. Fortunately, the last line of defense against totalitarianism was the simple fact of human nature. All the power of the state could not really make the "New Man," and no amount of lies could cover that up indefinitely. The Soviet Union crumbled to reveal the people of 1913 emerging from the shadows, wanting the same things out of life that they did then, without all the bombast, promises, fanfare, and lies.

Meanwhile, the legal regime promoted by feminism in the West served to damage the position of housewives and mothers, with "no fault" divorce (now being rethought even by feminists), anti-discrimination law and "affirmative action" to promote women and disadvantage tradtional breadwinner males in the workplace, and, just as importantly, the denigration of the very idea that a husband owes support to his wife.

The charm that totalitarianism had for feminism was real enough, even though the desire to control human nature wasn't just confined to radical theory. It has crept up on us from all directions. F.A. Hayek says there are basically two views on how society should be organized, tribalism and the free market. Karl Popper more crisply contrasts the Closed Society with the Open Society. Ayn Rand says that the paradigm of humanity in the Open Society of the marketplace is that of the trader. Feminist theory mostly still hates capitalism -- "patriarchy" is often simply equated with war, racism, and capitalism; feminism with pacifism, socialism, environmentalism, multiculturalism, and even vegetarianism -- in short, any case that might be regarded as "progressive" from a leftist point of view. Hence the ironic move of doctrinaire feminists dismissing with contempt Margaret Thatcher, one of the most successful, powerful, and historically important women, and the longest serving British Prime Minister, of the 20th century. Similarly, in 1994, Annie Potts, a Hollywood actress, dismissed Kay Bailey Hutchinson, soon to win election as a United States Senator from Texas, as a "female impersonator." That seems to say that only politically correct women are really women.

What happens under the principles of the free market and liberal democracy with the feminist view that human nature is created entirely by environment is that the view as a political force simply disappears: people can raise their children however they like; and if they have some sort of educational theory or ideology like feminism to use, that's their business. It is not the place of the state to promote one view or another, to label some views as politically sound and others as sexist or anything else. This is essentially the liberal regime of Sommers and Paglia. It is conformable, however, to the conservative regime of Graglia with a couple of specific provisions. (1) a true libertarian regime does not have anti-discrimination laws about relationships between private individuals, and (2) if family law is seen as it should be, as a matter of private marital contracts, then Graglia's notion of traditional marital duties, of husband and wife, can easily be restored for anyone who believes in them, by their adoption of the appropriate contract. If traditional marriage really is as proven by history as a good Burkean would maintain, then such marriages will be more successful than the alternatives that the legal regime would allow. This is not a matter, however, for political pre-judgment.

Hayek is clear that the marketplace is "unnatural" in a way and that people, yearning for the old tribalism, can simply hate it. The difference is that the old tribal societies were personal. Capitalism is impersonal. Tribalism involved mutual positive obligations. Capitalism involves voluntary trade and contract. Tribalism provided a secure place for everyone. Capitalism denies that absolute security is possible or that we have a right that strangers provide it for us. Tribalism left no doubts. Capitalism tells us nothing. Tribalism always provided for needs, to the extent that the group could provide. Capitalism doesn't care what we need, but will provide what we want....if we will work for it. Tribalism valued people. Capitalism, indeed, values what people do and want, which is reflected in prices. Thus Marx accused capitalism of reducing even the family to a cash relationship. The choice, indeed, is between security and insecurity, but also between slavery and freedom and, in fact, between poverty of secure socialism and wealth of insecure capitalism. It is hard to choose between security and freedom, and it is easy to hope that they could be had together, that tribalism (or socialism) could be combined with capitalism. With that hope, "freedom" can be pursued in a way that surprisingly leads to tribal slavery. That is what happened with both Marxism and feminism.

A Closed Society is based directly on interpersonal relationships and is inevitably hierarchical. Feudalism is a system of direct obligations to specific persons, and nowhere is that kind of thing better illustrated than in the Confucian "six relationships." While the "six relationships" are often cited as three pairs, it is possible to flesh out six full pairs; the relations between: ruler and subject; parent and child; husband and wife; teacher and student; older brother and younger brother; older friend and younger friend. In each of these relationships the elder or higher member owes benevolent protection and care to the lower or younger, while the lower owes to the higher conscientious (i.e. not blind) obedience and loyalty. These relationships are mostly established by who one is, not what one does or wants, and this in great measure is determined by birth. There can be security and humanity in these relationships, but there is no such thing as freedom; and it is indeed a "closed," womblike and suffocating arrangement. Virtually all societies were based on these principles until within the last couple of centuries. The view of feminism is that in these systems women were not even persons. But if the argument is simply that women were stuck in a certain place with a fixed thing to do, without freedom or any opportunity to work for self-realization, then there were simply no persons in these systems since their whole principle was a place for everyone and everyone in their place. The whole idea of personal fulfillment or self-realization or opportunity for individual growth was simply non-existent. Of course, that is why Ayn Rand dismisses these societies as simply vast forms of slavery. But even slaves can be persons. Even slaves can have some rights. And under feudalism there were rights and obligations for every position in the hierarchy. The hierarchs did not have arbitrary authority. Theirs was a place just as much as any other, albeit with more privileges and authority. Even someone at the very top of the system who becomes an individual, like the Egyptian god-king Akhenaton, can come to grief for it.

These hierarchical systems clearly come from our primate past, as they are universal, not just among primates, but among virtually all mammals who live in groups. Once we get back far enough, not only are there no concepts of individual fulfillment or opportunity, but it is clear that there could not even be such a thing since there is actually nothing to do apart from the immemorial activities of the species. Some feminists say that women have been oppressed for 30,000 years. That is just about the time of the emergence of modern humans (H. sapiens sapiens), but those humans were not so different from older H. sapiens, physically or culturally, and not much like us in any cultural form. Instead, with nothing but the addition of tools and language (and religion), human life wasn't socially all that different in its forms even from the life of baboons or lions. All that counted was survival, since survival is all that counts in nature. Because survival was all that counted, the only human activity that really counted was reproduction, and so the only humans who really counted were women. That did not make them individuals. Nature simply doesn't care about individuals when the survival of the group or the species is all that counts. But it is from that level of culture that all the symbols that some feminists now think are evidence of matriarchy were produced -- the steatopygous "Venuses" and so forth.

It is unlikely that there was real matriarchy. James George Frazer already addressed this question in his classic The Golden Bough [1890, 1900, 1906-1915]:

But in order to dissipate misapprehensions, which appear to be rife on this subject, it may be well to remind or inform the reader that the ancient and widespread custom of tracing descent and inheriting property through the mother alone does not by any means imply that the government of the tribes which observe the custom is in the hands of women; in short, it should always be borne in mind that mother-kin does not mean mother-rule. On the contrary, the practice of mother-kin prevails most extensively amongst the lowest savages, with whom woman, instead of being the ruler of man, is always his drudge and often little better than his slave. Indeed, so far is the system from implying any social superiority of women that it probably took its rise from what we should regard as their deepest degradation, to wit, from a state of society in which the relations of the sexes were so loose and vague that children could not be fathered on any particular man. [The Golden Bough, A New Abridgement from the Second and Third Editions, edited by Robert Fraser, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 393]

Although much of Frazer's theoretical approach is now objectionable, and there are other possible explanations for the origin of matrilineal descent, his conclusion about the political power of women in ancient and paleolithic societies is still supported by the archeological and ethnographic evidence, despite popular theories (e.g. Marija Gimbutas) about ancient (pacifistic and earth-friendly, i.e. utopian) matriarchy. But if there was no real political matriarchy, there was certainly was psychological matriarchy. Camille Paglia makes the decisive observation about the steatopygous Venuses: they mostly don't have faces, or hands, or feet. The womb of nature is blind and, literally, faceless. Nor is there really anything to do except reproduce, and hands and feet are not needed for that. Now this sounds dehumanized, but back then there is no other model of humanity to contrast it with. The first human art simply reproduces the forms of nature, and to nature there is no individuality and no value apart from survival. Now we might say that tools and so forth were the beginning of something different, and in retrospect we might like to see the art celebrate all the new tools and their heroic use against nature; but that would have been wholly anachronistic, meaningless, and absurd at the time. The tools were simply used for survival, and all survival was ultimately dependent on and subordinated to fertility. To live that life, however, is to live in the warm, smothering, embrace of the community -- the psychological matriarchy of C.G. Jung's Terrible Mother, who devours individuality for the comfort of unconsciousness. That continues to be the attraction of all forms of tribalism. Feminist yearning for the matriarchy can dangerously find expression, indeed, in yearning for the smothering certainties of totalitarianism.

In the marketplace all that remains of tribalism, the last irreducible unit, is the family. Even if husband and wife do not exist in the old hierarchical relationship, as they well might under Graglia's conservative form of marriage, parents and children inevitably do. It is a case of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny: you grow up in the closed community of the family, then go out into the world. This gives rise to ambivalences. Freedom is getting away from the family, but freedom can also be solitary and lonely. And then there is the purpose of that freedom. Some creative worthy goal is always a possibility; but for most people of average ability and limited ambition, the most worthy goal still seems to be to continue a family and so to make for the next generation the same warm source as the last. Making a living was usually hard, so there mostly was not much chance to reflect on things beyond the benevolent protection of the family. For the generations after World War II, however, when prosperity seemed so easy (at least to the children), the question inevitably arose about the purpose of a mere endless round of life creating life. Given the opportunity to make a living in various ways, room opens up for something more than just making a living for the sake of one's family. That can expose one even more to the solitary openness of freedom, and because of that most people still decided that family was fundamental in a fulfilling life. There is always going to be a problem, however, if one's original experience of family was unpleasant. The conclusion from that is easily that a family is dispensable or even malevolent. Gloria Steinem seems to have had an unpleasant experience -- a divorced father who went away, and mother who couldn't cope and drifted into mental illness. The result was that she didn't want any kind of marriage or family. If it is not just a matter of what one wants, however, but of a judgment that the institution is wrong and must be overthrown, then this can lead to speculation about human life without families. The taste of freedom in the independence of the marketplace can tempt one to generalize the situation into all of human life. That isn't really going to work, since few people want their entire life to be as cold, impersonal, detached, calculating, and negotiable as relationships in the marketplace. If the market cannot provide the things that were rejected with the family, then perhaps something else can: political life.

Giving political life the old power of the family, however, is the same as to return to a political principle of tribalism. But this is a key move of gender feminism. The slogan, "The personal is political," embodies that connection. It is a slogan full of monstrous and terrible danger. Where in capitalism the personal is separated from the political in that the family is separated from the marketplace, which is served by politics, the abolition of the family exposes the privacy of the individual to whatever political forces, whatever ideology, happens to be ascendant. This literally strips away privacy and posits a political test, not just for everything the individual does, but for everything the individual thinks, desires, and feels. This is consistent with the view of human nature as "socially constructed" -- "environmentalist" rather than "genetic" -- and is precisely what is advocated by feminist legal theorists like Catharine MacKinnon. On that view, there really is no nature, only nurture according to some ideology. With no nature, nothing is really "natural," no natural feelings, no natural desires, no natural actions, no natural responses. Spontaneity must always be suspect, since the more spontaneous anything is, the more purely it embodies some unexamined and probably discreditable ideological conditioning. It is impossible to be a Taoist on the environmentalist view since "not-doing" cannot produce anything fresh from the Tao, it can only reproduce some stale socialization. Thus one goes about one's life hesitating at each action, feeling, etc., thinking, "Now, does this conform to the Correct View of social existence that I have gotten from my political indoctrination?" If not, then it is time to confess one's political crimes and beg for reëducation from the more enlightened. That kind of life is completely intolerable for any but fanatical zealots and ideologues; and anyone else who is harangued or browbeaten about thinking that way just ends up hating it with a passion. And that is the kind of response that feminism began eliciting in the 70's. The "backlash" that is now decried in the 90's was never against women per se but against the catalogue of political crimes into which feminism wished to transform private life.

Whatever human nature is actually like, whether there are innate differences between the sexes or not, this must be completely irrelevant to political life. It is not up to politics to determine some biological matter of fact. Instead it is the nature of liberal democracy to ignore whatever differences there may be between persons, from whatever source, whether there are differences or not. That, indeed, is the Marxist accusation against capitalism, that some people do better than others, regardless of their needs. And people are different. Some people are smarter than others, some are taller, some have certain desires. What they do and how they fare is determined by the free trade of the marketplace. Whether differences like that align with sexual differences is an interesting question for certain sciences, but irrelevant to politics. To enforce some preconception about how people, or the sexes, must be the same will abridge the freedom not only of what they do but of what they are. Feminism was hell bent to abridge people's freedom in that respect. The choice is simple, freedom or slavery -- freedom to the uncertainty, unconformity, and the openness of the market, or slavery to the coercive power of the state to enforce a preconceived ideological conformity, right down to what people feel and believe.

It is not impossible, however, to say how men and women might, in general, be different. Indeed, it is the popular wisdom of every age in every place that they are, and there is not a whole lot of disagreement in what respects they are different. One precise issue to consider is what feminism likes to call "male violence." There is little doubt that the received wisdom in every culture is that men are suited for war and women, mostly, are not. And men are suited for war because they are larger and stronger but also more aggressive and naturally violent. Feminism can grudgingly admit the former qualities [note] but is adamant that the latter qualities are merely the result of social conditioning. Women would be just as aggressive and violent if they had been taught to be that way, and were expected to be that way, from childhood. This is, indeed, a serious question. And if aggressiveness and violence are entirely the result of conditioning, then feminism would also be right that violent crime by males (90% of the prison population is male) is the result of society conditioning males to commit violent crimes. Thus the view of many feminists that social norms instill hatred of women, since if there is ever any violence against women, the perpetrators must have been trained to behave that way.

This sort of thing seems like sheer, dangerous insanity to someone like Camille Paglia (let alone Carolyn Graglia). To her, it is social conditioning that contains and restricts violence, in which case attacking social conditioning will only result in more violence, not less. She traces the feminist point of view back to the 18th century philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, who said "Man is born free, but now is everywhere in chains." Rousseau's idea was that we are naturally good and pure, but that society has made us evil and twisted. Consequently, we should return to a kind of education that would allow children to just run free, without any inhibitions that traditionally were instilled in them. Since such ideas have influenced not only feminism but a lot of professional educators for the last thirty years, or the last eighty years (starting with John Dewey), it is sensible to now ask if the result has been more violence or less. Clearly it has been more. And we might ask, in more direct response to feminism, whether the sons of families without fathers are, in general, more violent or less violent than sons who have been raised with a strong father present. The answer to that is also that the sons from fatherless families tend to be more violent.

Since Paglia thinks that men are naturally more aggressive and violent than women, we can of course ask why that would be. Many children of the sixties, who firmly believed that all behavior was the result of conditioning, came in for a bit of a surprise when they had children of their own. However they tried to be "gender neutral," many had to admit that the boys they were raising definitely behaved rather differently than the girls. The boys tended to go charging around pounding things and the girls didn't. But in the face of that kind of intimate, albeit anecdotal, evidence, or even systematic, scientific studies, feminist denial can be monumental [note]. The evidence from nature itself, however, eliminates the socialization argument altogether. Among mammals, from sea lions to llamas, we frequently find males fighting each other over females, often over large "harems" of females, where the females themselves seem content to accept the winners of the combat. The most striking example, however, comes with hyenas. While male mammals typically have high levels of testosterone in the womb, which is responsible for the development of primary sexual attributes, hyena females also have high levels of testosterone, and this results in several striking results: One is that hyena females develop apparently male external genitalia. This made it rather difficult to tell male and female hyenas apart, and some naturalists originally thought that hyenas were hermaphroditic (with functioning male and female organs). The second result is that female hyenas are larger and dominant over the males in hyena groups; and the groups are large and important because hyenas hunt in packs, like dogs and wolves. But the third result is probably the most startling: in hyena burrows where the young are born, they begin, not just to fight among themselves, but to actually kill each other. A hyena pup will establish her dominance by killing all her sisters. This kind of thing sets us face to face, not with Rousseau and his "noble savage" in friendly nature, but with Darwin and "nature red in tooth and claw" -- the "law of the jungle."

Testosterone does not cause violence, but it creates a certain potential that can be expressed in different ways. Socialization does not create that potential, and it cannot eliminate it. What socialization must do is provide for constructive ways for the potential to be expressed. But in some ways it is a little more definite than that, with examples like the following: In many cultures, young men get together in groups and do typically foolish kinds of things [note]. Such groups range from the warrior bands found among ancient Germans or the modern Masai (in East Africa) to modern college fraternities and contemporary street gangs. Typical of all these groups are initiation rituals that usually involve discomfort, pain, humiliation (often sexual), or even serious danger. We now call this "hazing." This kind of thing makes little enough sense to adults, none to women, and periodically provokes tremendous outrage when it results in the injury or the death of participants. But every effort to completely stamp it out fails. Trying to eliminate it, of course, often drives it underground and results in more dangerous rituals than would have occurred otherwise.

But the whole idea of male associations like fraternities is anathema to feminism. Feminists necessarily view fraternities, not as vehicles of channeling and socializing male energy into the least destructive directions, but as the very mechanisms by which males are socialized into violent and patriarchal behaviors. Many colleges and universities consequently have been trying to eliminate fraternities altogether. Since that simply drives them off campus, many colleges and universities have tried to make membership in fraternities a punishable offense, even punishable by expulsion. That, naturally, can make secret membership even more attractive. On the other hand, the alternative of trying to make fraternities coed is also very awkward. If sexually humiliating hazing is disturbing enough when men practice it on each other, it automatically becomes sexual harassment or rape when it is practiced on women [note]. That is a non-starter as an institution. And now, with many more women in the military, in mixed sex basic training and housing, scandals have multiplied over sexual fraternization and rape. One "solution" has been to soften up basic training by not even allowing drilling instructors to shout at recruits (-- though I am informed that this is not now the case).

So we might ask, what was nonsense like hazing and shouting drill instructors all for? Was it just an expression of the potential for aggression and violence? It seems more complex than that. In The Myth of Male Power, Warren Farrell deals with this quite well [pp. 294-296]. If warriors or hunters, in the past, went into danger, it helped for them to know how their fellows would react under danger, stress, and fear; and it helped for them to know to what extent they could trust and rely on each other to act in certain ways. Adults with experience of life and of each other don't need artificial means to test themselves; but the young need to learn all those things, and to be trained, preferably in an artificial context first. While such tests and training may be somewhat dangerous, they are not likely to be as dangerous as the real life situations for which they are preparatory. Today, when such training may only be necessary in the military, police, or other dangerous and physically demanding professions [note], it is nevertheless noteworthy that groups of young men spontaneously engage in the same kinds of behaviors -- rough-housing, showing off, taking risks, taunting each other -- that would have been customary, planned, and controlled in the young men's groups of traditional societies. When those unplanned and uncontrolled activities begin to include drive-by shootings and gang wars, it is clear that there has been a major social failure to deal with male adolescent behavior. The feminist desire simply to get rid of that behavior may already be said to have proved itself a disastrous failure, since feminist ideology and the most socially disruptive expressions of street gang culture have all developed and expanded during the same period of time, within the last thirty years. The only effective way to deal with the young men is to accept, control, and channel their behavior, not to pretend that it can be abolished. At the same time, doing away with the emotionally and physically stressful aspects of military training, because women can't or shouldn't handle it as well, simply means that there will be no training, for either men or women, for the stress and trauma of actual war and combat.

Another aspect of differences between males and females is explored by Deborah Tannen in her best selling book You Just Don't Understand, which is about how men and women use conversation in different ways. Her simple thesis is that men basically use conversation to establish status and women use it to establish closeness. She does not commit herself to whether this difference is the result of nature or socialization. She simply thinks that because it is there (her book is full of examples), it must be dealt with. She does not try to deal with it through moralistic exhortations to abolish it, but simply tries to promote understanding. Her theory, however, raises intriguing questions. Tannen admits herself that men actually do care about closeness, and women do actually care about status. Very rough and tumble competition can create friendships for boys and men (starting with Gilgamesh and Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh), and status for girls and women can be determined by their closeness to the core of a prestigious social group.

This is reminiscent of C.G. Jung's theory about consciousness, the unconscious, and their relation to sexual differences. Jung thought that anything in the mind that did not appear consciously would appear unconsciously. In sexual terms, that means that sexuality, which appears in consciousness one way, appears as its opposite in the unconscious. That leads to Jung's theory that there is a female archetype, the anima, in the male unconscious and a male archetype, the animus, in the female unconscious. If we apply that to Tannen's theory about conversation, it simply means that the overt seeking of status by men or closeness by women is complemented by the covert seeking of closeness by men and status by women. Nowhere, indeed, is the female status system of "ins" and "outs" more painfully obvious that in Women's Studies Programs. The purpose of conversation there, as explored by Daphne Patai & Noretta Koertge in the recent Professing Feminism, Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's Studies [BasicBooks, 1994], is less the transmission of information or the cultivation of understanding than the transmission of a doctrine. Although the doctrine itself ferociously dismisses "patriarchal" hierarchy, it creates its own hierarchy simply in terms of how enthusiastically its message is received. Conspicuous agreement determines the "ins," rejection, scepticism, or even caution determines the "outs."

The issues that arise about all these differences between male and female require the most serious research and consideration, but this already goes beyond mainstream feminism, which has seemed resolutely unwilling to admit even the possibility of innate differences between the sexes. The closest it has come is to a moral difference between "genders," that the feminine point of view is superior to the masculine. This has usually just meant, however, that the masculine should be abandoned and the feminine adopted right across the board (even, paradoxically, in the military) -- which again presupposes that the "masculine" is something that can be abandoned. In terms of both the received traditions of the past and the best evidence of the present, this seems unlikely. Attempting social engineering through politics, which now extends to sexual harassment law in the workplace and a de-"masculinization" of the military, will most likely result in a phenomenon described by Jung: the reality being driven into the unconscious and expressed in the most destructive and irrational ways, as noted above with street gangs, etc.

The virtue of liberal society is that it allows people to try things their own way. If gender feminists want "gender-neutral" upbringing, they can practice that on their own children (if any). If professional couples want to both pursue their vocations and leave their children to the uncertain values (and behavior) of the nanny, they can do that. And if cultural conservatives want marriage where the husband supports his family and the wife stays home, they can do that, with traditional family law embodied in private contract. But this has never been the program of establishment feminism, whose instinct and preference has always been coercion and social engineering.

One of the most recent quotes at the top of this page is from an address in Australia by Russian Lesbian activist Masha Gessen. She asserts that, although gay people certainly have the right to marry (i.e. homosexually), she actually doesn't believe in marriage and thinks it should not exist. She says that the campaign for gay marriage thus involves lies about its purpose. A significant aspect of this business is that, even though the gay marriage campaign has been pitched as a demand for civil rights and equal rights, which ostensively have been denied to homosexuals, Gessen admits that the real goal of the campaign is to eliminate the rights of others, namely the right of "straight" people to marry, by eliminating marriage altogether.

This may come as news to homosexuals who simply believe that the expedients of private contracts, living wills, and legally sanctioned domestic partnerships do not rise to the level of rights or dignity involved in legal marriage; but it would come as no news to anyone familiar with the totalitarian inspiration of much of modern feminism, which has always been hostile to marriage and the family as private institutions, simply because they represent civil society and individual rights in opposition to the State. Gessen's admission that the campaign involves lies, although demonstrating some commendable spark of conscience on her part, is a larger significant admission about the dishonesty and dissimulation of Leftist politics in general -- the lies are nothing unusual, just standard operating procedure, as when the Bolsheviks promised land to the peasants but then murdered the peasants who opposed collectivized farms.

The campaign for homosexual civil rights, at least as represented by Masha Gessen -- and the audience who warmly applauded her -- is therefore unmasked as an attack on civil rights in general, in concert with the conceptual approach to twist around the meaning of "civil rights" to enhance the power of the State, rather than to restrict it. Gessen's spark of conscience consequently does not go nearly far enough. It does not lead to a determination to stop lying. That she voices her reservations, albeit to a friendly audience, nevertheless betrays a wreckless carelessness, given the propensity of such things to become public (even after a full year), that may bespeak even deeper moral doubts. One only hopes. Or she may simply have recollected herself and become comfortable with the lies.

In doing research for his book I Am Charlotte Simmons [2004], Tom Wolfe got the impression that the free love program had been successful and that college students no longer even bothered to have "dates," but that they simply "hook up" for casual sex -- with the tradtional preliminaries of drinks, dinner, movie, and all the modern equivalents of courting and spooning eliminated. He discussed this separately in the essay "Hooking Up" [in Hooking Up, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2000, p.3]. His own book, of course, was how this was all souless, callous, and emotionally empty.

Political feminism now agrees, but not in those terms. Unsatisfactory sex does not mean that casual sex is heartless and unsatisfying. It means rape -- even if the woman solicited the man, provided him with condoms, and met him, obviously for sex, in his own dorm room -- or even, incredibly, invited him into her own room and her own bed, where they spent the night, with unalarmed roommates nearby -- but with retrospective accusations of rape. This charge can then be prosecuted, according to guidelines set forth by the Obama Administration, without the participation of anyone who knows anything about rape law, or law in general (which means that administrators and Stalinist political activists at colleges sit as judges), without telling the defendant of the actual charges against him, without allowing him the advice of counsel, without allowing discovery of the evidence, and without allowing the cross-examination, or sometimes even the identification and presence, of the accuser. In other words, Feminism wants secret, kangaroo courts that are designed to produce convictions, resulting in sanctions or even the expulsion of male students from colleges. We could call this the "Revenge of Susan Brownmiller," as the narrative of the college "rape culture" is now little different from what she had said.

Thus, having been suckered in with promises of great sex, the modern male student instead has been sandbagged, accused of rape when it may be that all he thought he was doing was going along with the hedonistic hookup Zeigeist. His error, of course, was to accept the Feminist thesis that women feel the same way about sex that men do -- on pain of being called a "sexist" if it is denied -- even while Feminists don't believe this themselves, since men are all rapists. The truth, of course, is simply that Feminists believe that women feel the same way abour sex as gay men, who are not going to be having sex with women at all. This assertion is not true about women either, but it does mean that men can avoid trouble just by being gay.

Curiously, rape accusations that become sensations on college campuses often do not translate into any urgency about criminal proceedings against the accused. Although we may reflect that campus authorities and activists often realize that they would get nowhere with the police, given the lack of evidence, or its incoherence, the consideration also suggests itself that for the activists the political issue is almost more important than the criminal one -- indeed, rape as a political crime is more important than its status in regular criminal law. When actress Sandra Bernhard voiced the wish in 2008 that Republican Vice-Presidential candiate Sarah Palin be raped by black men, there was no protest about this from Feminists, for whom such an act would be a revolutionary attack by the oppressed on the oppressor, regardless of her female or their male sex.

And, to return for a moment to Planet Earth, real sexual assault should not be a matter of "student discipline" at all, any more than murder or a knifing would be. Rape accusations should immediately bring in the police, and the colleges could simply take cognizance of the results of any, if any, criminal proceedings. Obviously, this is not good enough for whatever the purpose of the activists is.

Since men should know already that American education has become a "hostile environment" for them, they should take the hint -- and note the other evidence, such as post-graduation unemployment statistics, student debt, and the uselessness of many majors (e.g. ethinic studies) -- and decide that higher "education" is no longer worth it. Feminists, who complain about certain professions or venues being "pink ghettos," are doing their determined best to see to it that college becomes such a place.

A lot of this sounds familiar. Much of it is a repeat, even with some of the same phony statistics, of the agitation that we saw back in the 1990's. Twenty years later, there is now a new generation that has not been through the earlier experience. A salient feature again is the apparent principle that women become morally incompetent under the influence of alcohol more quickly than men do. Thus, in an equally drunk couple, the woman may subsequently decide that she was incapable of giving consent to sex, even if she initiated intercourse, while the male remains fully liable for criminal intent. Where this principle has been applied by colleges in cases, male students have already been successful at getting it reversed in court because of its clear display (ironically) of "gender bias." And a principle that women are less morally responsible than men hardly seems like the kind of thing that feminists would want to establish -- although in the previous period radicals like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin argued that all sex was rape because no women, as victims of the patriarchy, were morally able to give consent. Nevertheless, the inability of women to give consent under any level of intoxication has been seriously proposed for the law.

Equally familiar is the bizarre requirement that a woman give "positive consent" for every stage of sexual activity, meaning an affirmative answer to an explicitly posed question. Years ago, this was suggested as a rule for Antioch College, and was soon laughed out of public discourse. Now, however, it is the law of the State of California; and one is left to wonder how such an invasion of privacy could possibly be enforced, or how it is to differ from the general question of consent, or related issues. Thus, if a woman does not give verbal consent because she is passed out drunk, this is no different from the matter already at issue. And if a woman acquiesces to or initiates intercourse, without a positive verbal statement, does this mean that the man remains criminally liable? Or is the women equally liable, if the "positive consent" principle is not simply a one way street, as an instrument to condemn males, as the activists certainly would like? Of course, even if "positive consent" were obtained by signature on a contract, with perhaps a check-list for each "base," this would be worthless, since such a contract carries no obligation, and either party can void their consent or commitment at any time. So such a signature actually signifies no relevant form of consent.

Something else familiar this time around is the principle that it is virtuous and enlightened always to believe the "victim," i.e. the accuser, even when the evidence begins to pile up against them. I have not yet heard voiced the principle, common earlier, that women do not lie about rape (except, of course for Juanita Broaddrick, who accused Bill Clinton of rape -- women accusing Democrats are always lying). I expect it is lurking around there and will be asserted eventually. In such a case, we might ask (devilishly), "Do you believe what the girls said at the Salem Witch Trials?" (in 1692-1693). The automatic reponse would likely be "Yes," since the question might be taken to imply that the "girls" were those accused of witchcraft. However, the girls were the accusers, not the victims: Betty Parris (9 years old), her cousin Abigail Williams (11), Ann Putnam (12), and Elizabeth Hubbard (17) claimed that they were afflicted, and experienced fits and convulsions, because of "spectral" attacks from witches, who were people they knew personally or could easily recognize. Their accusations led to the charging of 150 men, women, and children with witchcraft and sorcery. Twenty people were executed, women and men, mostly by hanging, but one man died from stones being put on his chest to coerce a plea, which he refused to make, and died.

The modern accusations of rape, when often by confused or dishonest young women, thus begin to look like a classic case of a "witch hunt." While the narrative about witch trials is generally that it was the patriarchy oppressing independent women, that doesn't quite square with the Salem case, where girls were the accusers and both women and men were accused. This time, the whole process is promoted as an attack on the patriarchy, i.e. men, regardless of the facts or justice of individual cases. As such, it is far more a genuinely bogus "witch hunt" than were the investigations of people like Senator McCarthy into Communists. There were Communists and Soviet spies. There weren't witches (except in H.P. Lovecraft). And, although there are sexual assaults and rapes on college campuses, there are far fewer than the narrative of the bogus "rape culture" asserts, and the proper response to them is the police, not "student discipline" in kangaroo courts. And young women should get the message that if they are uncertain about sex, it is imprudent, at least, to invite a man into their bed for the night. It is bound to give the wrong impression, both to the man, to the police, and to any possible jury. It's not that it cannot be rape, it's just that it may not be believable -- morally or legally.

But we know what is going on here. The inflamatory "rape culture" narrative serves the political purposes of Feminism, which otherwise leaves people, including women, uninterested. However, to the extent that actual rape charges are discredited, and the principles used in college "discipline" proceedings are countermanded by actual courts, feminists run the risk of the whole business being marked up as "hysteria," unfortuately with its original meaning as a mental disorder of women -- who are afflicted by possessing a womb, , hystéra, in Greek. This serves the genuine cause of women no more than the principle of their inability to consent under alcohol. But feminism repeatedly suffers from this habit of reviving what, in feminists terms, look like female sexual stereotypes. In 1993, Katie Roiphe already expressed dismay (The Morning After, Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus) that the feminist campaign at that time was reducing women to the moral status of children. Now we have to go through it all over again.

Thus the future of the use of "gender" is unclear. It depends on the true purposes of feminism, which may not be candidly stated to the public. It also depends, of course, on the ability of "gender" feminism to maintain its political influence and success in the face of the falsehood of its theory and the anti-capitalist roots and program of its politics.

Feminism, Note 3

I don't have to look far for an example, since my own father gave up going to UCLA and working towards an engineering degree when his uncle offered him a job and he decided that he needed it to support his family. And my mother wasn't even a housewife. She worked all her life, except for my first five years.

Feminism, Note 4

"Grudgingly" is the key word there. Although the original feminist demand was that a woman should be allowed to do anything she is qualified or able to do, this has slowly shifted over to the requirement that standards be changed to allow more women to qualify for any profession or activity. Although the United State Army determined that, in general, women only have about 52% of the upper body strength of men, both the military and other physically demanding professions, like firefighting, now often have separate physical standards, or special training programs, just to increase the number of women who can pass the training. Why this has happened, or why it is thought to be necessary, has mostly not been a matter for candid admission or public debate.

Feminism, Note 7

A stunning variation on this was reported in a street gang in San Antonio, Texas, where females could become gang members by engaging in unprotected sex with a male gang member known to have a venereal disease.